Month: June 2016

We’re pleased to announce that a digital collection from Special Collections is now discoverable in Bobcat. Items from the David Wojnarowicz Papers from Fales Library can now be discovered and accessed right from the Library’s main catalog. The magic behind this feat is Ichabod, a joint project from DLTS and KARMS, which ingests metadata from heterogeneous sources, normalizes it, and sends it to Primo (the software that powers Bobcat). Now that we’ve made one collection available in Bobcat, we can work on others: Camp Kinderland, Gay Cable Network, the Washington Square Photo Collection, photography from the Arab world, and many others.

Making these digital collections available through our main discovery interface is the goal of Strategic Initiative 4.3, and we’re well on the way to fulfilling that promise. Special thanks to the Ichabod team (Carol Kassel, Corey Harper, Daniel Lovins, David Arjanik, Ekaterina Pechekhonova, Esha Datta, Joseph Pawletko, Mike Haag, Reed Shadgett, and Stephen Balogh) as well as ACM and Special Collections for helping us reach this milestone.

Earlier this year, we completed work on a massive renovation for our book viewer. The new viewer for books and other media uses scalable software and protocols, such as MongoDB and JSON, to deliver book information and book images efficiently. The new infrastructure also allows us to publish books more quickly, with less human intervention. We reduced our time-to-publish for Arabic Collections Online from 2 months for 200 books to about one week. This dramatic improvement has allowed us to scale our publication schedule from 200 books every other month to 400 books every month. As of this writing, ACO has almost 3,000 books, double the amount that we had earlier this year.